Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign. Sherard Cowper-Coles

arbakai, or tribal levies, which had protected Afghanistan’s eastern border under the monarchy.

      The other important point was that I was not suggesting that ISAF proceed full tilt with setting up such a scheme right across the insurgency-infected areas. Rather, I thought we should experiment with a pilot scheme which involved the Afghan authorities at least as much as ISAF forces. Such a test drive of the idea would require parallel political and economic progress. Only thus could one ensure that the volunteers were under proper political control.

      This first idea received a generally positive reaction from London. Everyone could see the wisdom of at least trying something on those lines, and of how such an approach tracked with Britain’s historical experience, in Afghanistan and elsewhere. An experiment made sense.

      The same could not be said, however, of the second idea. Even before I had arrived in Afghanistan, I had been puzzled by the British Army’s policy of rotating whole brigades through Helmand every six months. I knew that successful counter-insurgency needed experienced leadership, with detailed knowledge of the human as well as the physical terrain. It also needed leadership known to the local population, and known by them to be committed for the long haul. I was aware that Sir Gerald Templer had been asked to do a tour of at least two years in Malaya, and that in Northern Ireland we had soon stopped rotating every six months the key brigade commanders in the province.

      A further critical piece of background was that the standard US Army tour in Afghanistan at that time was fifteen months, without a break. The only exception to this was if a member of a GI’s immediate family was dangerously ill. In my view, fifteen months without a break was far too long: many GIs, particularly those in some of the toughest bases in the eastern mountains, seemed to be sustained on their tours only by happy pills or the muscular brand of evangelical Christianity promoted by the US Army chaplains, or both. But there had to be a balance somewhere between the continual rotation of British forces and the excessive demands placed on American forces.

      I therefore recommended to London, in the second of two telegrams, that we should look at the possibility of moving the senior British officers in Helmand, and other key officers, particularly those in intelligence, on to longer tours. They could do so on new terms, akin to those of the civilians in the field. Perhaps they could have the option of having their families quartered in the Gulf or Oman, or of a long weekend back in Britain every two months. The idea would be to establish a standing Helmand Brigade of the British Army. I also recommended that the fighting units, the battalions or battle groups, should continue to be rotated every six months, or perhaps at even shorter intervals, on a staggered basis, throughout the year, thus spreading the load on the RAF air bridge.

      I gained some encouragement from learning that senior ‘purple’ officers in the Ministry of Defence (MOD) in Whitehall and at the Permanent Joint Headquarters at Northwood in Middlesex (PJHQ) – that is, those in tri-service jobs – were sympathetic to such an approach. But the top brass of the British Army did not favour such a change. The Army was organised on the basis of brigades, and fought on the basis of brigades. This was an Army matter, not one for civilians or the PJHQ to interfere in. This argument had a number of holes in it. One was that several brigades were formed specifically for the purpose of the Helmand tour, and dissolved shortly after returning to the UK. A second flaw was that operations which involved the whole brigade were few and far between.

      But the main reason why I rather cheekily stuck my head above the parapet was my view that the six-month rotation system risked the British Army in Helmand continually reinventing the wheel. In three and a half years working in and on Afghanistan, I saw eight different brigadiers and their brigades in Helmand. Those officers were without doubt some of the brightest and best in the British Army and the Royal Marines. But, with important and laudable variations, I saw a pattern repeat itself.

      Each brigade would spend months or even years preparing for deployment. Preparations complete, the brigade would be moved gradually out to theatre, under a procedure known as Relief in Place (or, more colloquially, as the RIP). As thousands of troops flew out from the air base at Brize Norton in Oxfordshire in one direction, so thousands flew back. The strain on the RAF’s fleet of ageing Tristar troop transports was immense. Once in theatre, the brigadier and his team would work as closely as possible with the FCO and DFID teams in Helmand, as well as with the Afghans and, of course, the Americans. They clearly understood the importance of politics, particularly tribal politics, and of development. They grasped the need for strategic patience, and for consolidating the gains made by the previous brigade. They signed up to the ‘comprehensive approach’.

      And yet, in almost every case, each brigadier did what he could be only expected to do, as he enjoyed what had to be the highlight of his professional career as a soldier: commanding a brigade in war. He planned and launched a major kinetic operation. That is what soldiers do, with glory at the back of every half-decent warrior’s mind. Each operation made local, tactical sense in Helmand. Each undoubtedly suppressed Taliban activity in its chosen area. Each might have happened even if there had been no six-month rotation system. Each was of course cleared through the ISAF machine. But, through no fault of the individual brigadiers, few of these operations were genuinely part of a serious overarching political strategy. None made more than a cursory nod in the direction of the US Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual’s reminder that counterinsurgency (or COIN) is mainly politics. Many consisted of little more than, in one Helmand brigade commander’s memorable phrase, ‘mowing the lawn’. If Ministers or officials in London questioned the need for a particular operation, they did so usually because they wanted to be assured that casualties would be kept to a minimum, not because they wondered how the operation fitted into a coherent national-level COIN strategy.

      I was fortified in my conviction that longer tours for some officers made sense by an encounter during one visit to Helmand. A brave young officer who knew one of my sons came up to me and asked for a private word. He told a tale of disappointment. The efforts his battle group were making were just not producing lasting success. The strategy of training up the Afghan Army and Police to ‘hold’ areas ‘cleared’ by Task Force Helmand couldn’t work in the timescales then envisaged. Much later, when he was back in England, he told me privately: ‘many senior … officers … are covering up failings or trying to achieve short-term … solutions which actually lead to longer term failings’, adding, typically, that he would ‘leap at the chance to go out again [to Afghanistan] tomorrow’.

      Despite the initial rebuff, I kept up the pressure for a bit. But after a while I gave up, because, absent a coherent wider political strategy, the effort needed to make such a change hardly seemed worth the trouble. Yet, in January 2011, the News of the World reported what MOD sources were promising at last: ‘TOP BRASS TO SPEND YEAR IN HELMAND’. We shall see.

      The debate on CDVs or local defence forces ran on for years. The initial reaction from the Americans and the Afghans was sceptical. No one wanted a return to the bad old days of warlords and militias. Too many people had unpleasant memories of the way in which local private armies had terrorised Afghanistan between the fall of the Najibullah regime in 1992 and the arrival in Kabul of the Taliban in 1996. And there were more recent stories too, of how militias sponsored by Western agencies had driven the Taliban from power in 2001 and had had a free run of much of the country until NATO and the Afghan authorities had gradually asserted themselves. An Auxiliary Afghan Police Force had been raised in 2006, and then disbanded, for reasons which were never entirely clear to me. The US Embassy and the State Department were particularly hostile.

      But, as the years passed, US forces started to experiment with rather more radical – and risky – ideas for raising local militia-type forces. So by 2011 this may have been an idea, invented this time in CentCom (US Central Command at Tampa in Florida) rather than in south London, whose time had come. But it will need careful handling. Back in 2007 we were probably too forward with our proposals. In the long run, however, Afghanistan will need some sort of armed neighbourhood watch scheme, but only as part of a wider political settlement which establishes representative local shuras of elders to whom such volunteers must be accountable.

      Given that only 3 per cent of the soldiers in the Afghan National Army are Pashtuns from the south, some sort of more locally based recruitment for the Army has to make sense. Later in my time,